When's the last time you've loved a piece of fruit? I mean, really, truly loved? Who wants to eat a dry, white-centered strawberry? And there's no way our kids are eating their fruits and vegetables if they don't taste great. They'll choose artificially sweetened treats over the sad little strawberry every time.

Imagine if we -- the food customers -- rallied around a higher standard to serve our collective satisfaction. Could we really stand up to Big Food? Would we be biting off more than we could hope to chew and swallow, or might we really change the food supply?

You may have seen the study, with 'smoking gun' headlines, showing a correlation between severe stomach inflammation and GM feed in pigs. Take a closer look and you will see it is indeed a stinging indictment, but not of GM feed.

For a resilient food supply, we need to keep our specialty farmers farming and we need to make it monetarily worth their while not to sell out. We need to replace abandoned acres of asphalt with small allotments and grow crops.

How many of us have wished we could predict the future? To gaze into a crystal ball and see our fate in fifty years time? A group of agricultural researchers from around the globe are coming together to do just that, and examine the future of our food system.

There is an intrinsic problem with measuring the quality of a system by how well it conforms to what you already believe. Such a system gets bonus points for agreeing with you -- even when you are wrong.

It is clear we also need to embrace technology to enable us to double or triple food production to meet our needs. It may not sound too tasty, but just yesterday a Dutch scientist unveiled what purports to be a hamburger grown in a test tube from bovine stem cells.

Inefficiencies in harvesting, packaging, storing, transporting, marketing and selling, rather than just low yields or poor farming techniques, are often to blame for food shortages and low prices for growers.